Archived Books
Bridges to Kerouac
by Mark Schorr
Currently Unavailable
Reflecting on the deaths of Paul Tsongas and Allen Ginsberg within a few months of each other, poet Mark Schorr was moved to illuminate them in the same poem. For many years, "O Mighty Engineer," written in the prophetic mode of William Blake and Ginsberg, has been available online and at public readings around Lowell, Massachusetts.
Now published for the first time in a chapbook form, this edition includes haiku in the disembodied poetics of Jack Kerouac for J.M. Whistler, another mythical figure linked to Lowell. Ginsberg called this form of haiku "American sentences." Schorr has included digital woodcuts of Lowell's bridges to further illuminate these mythical links.
A Trip Down Salem Street
by Wlater Bacigalupo
Currently Unavailable
Walter Bacigalupo creates a world of place and a world of memory in this collection that connects a personal past to an ever-changing present. Starting at a café, a concert hall, a long-gone store, or the neighborhood that is the source of his cultural DNA, he probes the actual place to find meaning and make sense. He maps experience in ways that we can draw on as we journey forward.
— Paul Marion
Mid Drift
The poet Major Jackson, author of Holding Company (2010) had this to say about Hanson Foster's Mid Drift: "Hanson Foster dramatizes life (real people and places) in language: and thus, her brilliant poems are to my ears courageous. Most of all she is a lyrical thinker who makes thinking sensuous and alluring. Consider yourself lucky to read her poems, it is truly a distinct experience."
Set in post-industrial Lowell, Massachusetts, Mid Drift contains a speaker who is seduced by the "ugliness" of the city including prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness, and infidelity. Many poems also explore themes of family, religion and spirituality, and loss of self. Poet and writer, Amy Gerstler writes of Mid Drift: "Hanson Foster captures the arresting sense of how loss scrapes away layers of one's personhood exposing a quiet resilience, maybe even a rising faith, that glimmers dimly underneath abiding grief like some kind of ore."
Sweeney-on-the-Fringe
by Dave Robinson
Currently Unavailable
“Owen Kivlin, the narrator of Dave Robinson’s novel Sweeney On-the-Fringe,sidles up to the reader as unassumingly as Ishmael and announces that he’s got a tale to tell. And what a tale it is. The elusive, eponymous Sweeney is aman on a quest. Told through letters, dramatic narrative, interviews andpoems, SOTF is a wild, lyrical ride of a book, rich with mythic allusion, off-beatcharacters and a roll-your-own New England vernacular that is dead on. WillSweeney find what he seeks: truth, self,adventure, romance and the perfectwave? You’ll have to read to find out. Recommended.”
—David Daniel, author of Goofy Foot and Reunion
“What a brilliant narrative, sparkling with images and memorable prose, Dave Robinson has created in Sweeney on-the-Fringe! Music is made with yellsand whispers, with secrets and laughter, combining styles and genres, on thepages of an adventurethat startles and unsettles us with its truths. Robinsonis an inventive, compeling prose master.”
—Ilya Kaminsky,author of the Dorset Prize-winning Dancing in Odessa
“Quirky, moody, whimsical, witty and kinda funky-urbane, Dave Robinson's Sweeney is as weird as Eliot’s, Joyce’s, Heaney’s, but much more palatable tous early 21st-century surf-addled readers. This is one to enjoy and savor!”
—Drew Kampion, U.S. Editor of The Surfer’s Path,author of The Lost Coast
Cameo Diner
by Matt Miller
Currently Unavailable
"The work of Matt Miller is full of this thing called conscience. This is not a writer pining for a stint on a famous talk show, or eager to 'network' to find out about the next literary contest that might give him a glimpse of recognition. Matt writes, as a fellow Merrimack Valley writer, Andre Dubus, once described it, 'Into the silence of mortality'--into the mystery of what it is to be human, with our annihilation always a possiblity, with our determination always plucking us up from despair. How is it that human beings survive, the poet seems to ask, with so much madness about, so much danger--so much impulse on the part of the powerful to use the next human being as part of an agenda." - Joe Hurka, author of the Pushcart Prize-winning memoir Fields of Light
"Matt Miller is that rare poet who has us realize, after lifting our eyes away from one of his exacting poems, that we are among the sleep-walkers. Here, seeing is sensuous. His modulated imagery and full-bodied lines are rivaled only by his grand sense of our humanity, hammered and stamped by the work we perform, the cirmustances we are born into and what decisions we are faced to bear. Cameo Diner signals a new voice with no need of a chat room, and yet in dialogue with all that we once were and definitely where we are today." - Major Jackson, author of Leaving Saturn
Lost Baggage
by Charles Levenstein
Currently Unavailable
Charles Levenstein's poems touch down in familiar and strange territory. He maps the interior landscape whose signpost bears his own name. Home and away, back and forth, old and new--all the journeys through time and space that make a private life, a public world. The writer joins mile-marked segments to make a spiritual yardstick that he sets against his experience so the reader can take a measure.
Charles Levenstein is professor of work environment policy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the editor of New Solutions, an international journal of occupational and environmental health policy. In addition to his work at Lowell, he is adjunct professor of occupational health at Tufts University, visiting professor at Central European University in Budapest, and lecturer in occupational health at Harvard School of Public Health. He is co-director of Umass Lowell's World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Occupational Health. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Point of Production: The Political Economy of the Work Environment, with John Wooding.
French Class
(1999)
We have eight pristine copies of this book available thanks to author Susan April who had preserved these copies. This is a one-time offer. One book per customer due to limited quantity.
by April, Brouillette, Marion and St. Onge
This book is an important contribution to the literature of New England. In their poems, essays, and journal excerpts, the authors give voice to the experience of growing up and living as Americans of French-Canadian descent in the second half of the 20th century. The main setting is Lowell, Mass., in the Merrimack Valley. Writing about spirituality, family, work, language and food, he authors show how we can move beyond memory and make our past a meaningful part of an evolving life. Michael Kenney of The Boston Globe wrote: "The authors represent a vibrant ethnic thread not often examined in contemporary American writing." In the York County Extra of Maine, reviewer Juliana L'Heureux called the book "A classy tribute to the French. Using absolutely wonderful metaphors and French homespun phrases, the stories thread together like a cultural Rosary.”
Fractured Identities; Cambodia's Children of War
by James Higgins and Joan Ross with Sovann-Thida Loe
Currently Unavailable
In this photo-documentary book, Higgins and Ross trace the changes and growth among young Cambodian-Americans in the ten years since the publication of their book Southeast Asians: A New Beginning in Lowell. The authors examine how the refugee and resettlement experience affected the lives of young people and how America has shaped their cultural identity. In their own voices, the young men and women describe their goals and dreams, as well as the challenges they face. The Christian Science Monitor praised the photo-documentary work of Higgins and Ross as "sensitive and empathetic.”
Baptism in the Merrimack
by Hilary Holladay
Currently Unavailable
This chapbook-length collection of writings starts out in Lowell, Mass., and winds its way back to the author's ancestral home in Rapidan, Virginia, along the Rapidan River. These are poems about places where nature and the individual spirit merge, the one flowing inevitably into the other. The concluding essay, "The News from Kerouac's Lowell," is a meditation on Jack Kerouac's life and continuing presence in his hometown.
Vital Records
: Poems from the LIRA Writing Workshop (1994), ed.
by Paul Marion
Currently Unavailable
In chapbook format, poems by 12 writers from three poetry workshops that Marion led in 1992 and 1993 for the UMass Lowell Learning in Retirement Association. The writing workshops were informed by Kenneth Koch's groundbreaking book about teaching poems to older persons, "I Never Told Anybody." Form and content vary widely in the selections, but throughout one finds authentic and original voices.
Hit Singles
by Paul Marion
Currently Unavailable
Fourteen poems in chapbook form, all of which were published one by one in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, such as Yankee, Bohemian (Japan), The Salmon (Ireland), Beat Scene (England), Nexus, Salamander, and Kennebec.
Middle Distance (1989)
by Paul Marion
Currently Unavailable
Written in the spirit of Gary Snyder's bioregional literary ethic, this full-length collection advances Paul Marion's hyper-local writing project. The book opens with quotations from John Greenleaf Whittier and Kerouac. Includes poems published in West Branch, Zone 3, and The Merrimack Journal.
Strong Place: Poems ‘74 – ‘84
by Paul Marion
Currently Unavailable
The first full-length collection of poems by Paul Marion, whose writing Apple Tree Review described as "clear, precise, and earthy." Stony Hills compared the poems to those of "Stafford or Snyder…universal while remaining on an intimate scale…" Among the work in this book is the author's first cycle of "Lowell poems," which reach into the places and people in the historic American city where he was born.
Apples and Oranges (1986)
by Paul Marion
Currently Unavailable
This chapbook includes poems set in New England and Southern California, where Marion had lived in the mid-1980s. The poem "A Higher Level of Notation" was commissioned by the City of Lowell for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the city's founding.
The Loom Reader
by Paul Marion
Currently Unavailable
This chapbook-style anthology of poems by nine writers includes early work by Maurya Simon and Juan Delgado, graduates of the University of California, Irvine, MFA Poetry Workshop. Both of them later published collections with major presses. Also featured is Dana White's trilogy about her father, a military pilot killed in the Vietnam War.
Merrimack Poetry Anthology (1992), ed.
by Aponick, Brox and Marion
Currently Unavailable
a collection of poems by 52 writers from the Merrimack Valley of New England.
